


Wherein Christopher Pike falls off a horse

by kayliemalinza



Series: Rambleverse [2]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen, Injury, Kayliemalinza's Rambleverse, Pike POV, Pre-Academy Years (Rambleverse Timeline), The Ranch (Rambleverse Setting)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-21
Updated: 2011-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-02 06:24:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/365917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Christopher is twelve years old, he falls off a horse and is dragged for a thousand yards over scrub brush and red canyon rock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wherein Christopher Pike falls off a horse

When Christopher is twelve years old, he falls off a horse and is dragged for a thousand yards over scrub brush and red canyon rock.

Next thing he knows, he's in the hospital and Uncle X is leaning over him and pressing the palm of his hand into Chris' belly, into the one spot (above and to the left of the belly button) that isn't covered in a bandage or sticky with antiseptic jelly. He whispers to Chris in his muddle of an accent--Texas drawl corseted by prep school clip and slathered with a droll Scottish scrape--that everything is going to be okay.

He's sobbing when he says it, though, so Chris doesn't trust it much.

Then Laney comes into the room, her hyper-train pass card sticking out of her jacket pocket, and she takes a couple of seconds to make sure he's awake and responsive before she starts scolding.

"I told you not to ride that damn horse, Christopher!" she snaps, and she's shaking, and Uncle X wraps his arms around her shoulders as soon as she gets close enough.

"M'sorry," Chris says, because he does know better. She's told him hundreds of times not to even go near that horse and he went and did it anyway because he's stupid and he's a brat and he's so goddamn stubborn and sometimes she doesn't know what to do with him. "You're hurting my hand," he says. His knuckles are scabbed and she's squeezing too hard.

Laney flushes and grabs his wrist instead, pressing her thumb into the pulse point like she has to make sure it's still going.

 

He's in a wheelchair for six months and spends most of it at the ranch in Scotland, texting Laney and his boarding school friends and the few cousins he's decided he likes. His mother doesn't like all the beepy medical things, doesn't understand them, but she understands the wheel and the crutch and the unbearable pain. She cobbles together all kinds of modifications for the chair: a nerf ball launcher to startle the dogs with, a crane-arm to grab things high up, and wide, curving skids for skimming through mud. Uncle X lifts him in and out of the chair without breaking a sweat because "you don't weigh any more than a sheep does, son."

 

It takes him a year to re-learn how to run but he can walk well before that, so he does, charting every path on the ranch and every road in the village beside it. He scuffles past the houses of people he went to kindergarten with and doesn't remember, people he'd be close friends with now if his grandmother hadn't insisted on boarding school. This could have been the hearth of his world: sopping green hills clotted with sheep and hazy gray mountains, not red.

 

The horse is waiting in Texas. Chris crawled into his sister's bed one night and stayed there, whining and clawing her clothes, until she called their grandmother and said not to sell it or kill it or turn it out loose. That's Christopher's horse.

It's his horse because it is beautiful, piebald and wary, because it raises dust when it runs and its mane is spiky like some dark sun and because Chris saw its shadow first, slapped across the canyon floor like a dare. It is the first alien thing he's ever loved.


End file.
